The Feast of the Ascension of Christ is the feast of His Going Away. The old and delightful iconography of the feast makes a point of it: the Lord Jesus feet are protruding from a cloud that has removed Him from their sight. He’s outta here.
He’s outta here, though, for a reason—rather, for several reasons: all of them good but one demands some pondering.
You know that after His Resurrection, the Lord Christ came and went as He pleased, to the extent that He walked into rooms with thick walls and locked doors, appeared and unappeared as He wanted, and, as I’ve mentioned, His friends were often initially unsure as to Who He was when He did show up. Scripture tells us repeatedly they took Him for a ghost, so He walked and talked with them in the sunlight, sat down and ate with them, gave them His hands still marked with nail prints to poke their fingers through. Whatever had happened to Him, this was no ghost. On that certainty they were willing to bet their lives—which, as the matter of fact, every one of them did.
They knew that He’d been dead “as a doornail,” to use that great old Latin phrase. Now not only was He alive, He was alive beyond what they understood “being alive” to mean. Their Lord, Who’d wrestled with death and won, was surely here now would set everything to rights. Forty days after His Resurrection, He met one last time with His disciples (they didn’t know it would be a Very Long Time before they would see Him again). “When they had come together,” St Luke tells us, “they asked Him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’ ”
They still didn’t get it. They were hoping the Lord Who created the heavens and earth would raise an army and kick the Romans out of Palestine. They didn’t understand He was calling them to overturn not only the Roman world, but every human thing that puts itself in the place of God.
So Jesus led them to the top of the Mount of Olives. There, “as they were looking on,” says St Luke once again, “He was lifted up and a cloud took Him out of their sight.” He was gone.
He wouldn’t walk on the Galilean seashore anymore, pray with them in Gethsemane, no more would they hear Him spin out a parable. He was gone. Why?
If He remained with them, their faith, and ours, would have focused on the Amazing Man who died and came back to life. He might have globe-trotted like the Dalai Lama, or ended up 24/7/365 healing the sick, raising the dead and in continual demand as a marriage and family counselor.
He left them so the Truth He’d planted, the One Church He founded, could come to be. No more would His hands be the only hands to heal, His voice the only one to pronounce forgiveness or teach His followers to pray. His hands, His voice, His love, all of which a thirsty world still craves, now come to that world through us.
His disciples looked up longingly toward the cloud, but He was gone. He didn’t stay because His kingdom is not of this world: our hearts, as His disciples today, aren’t meant to be focused here any more than theirs were. The Only-Begotten Son became one of us to lift our gaze from the beauty we can see to the Beauty our unresurrected eyes cannot see. One Day, He will come again, in glory we cannot imagine and power we cannot comprehend. He will come for us.—Fr Gregory Wilcox
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